[PhilWright]

Being caught out using software you did not correctly license is not the problem. That would be fair enough. It is the burden of proof and the time it consumes when you have done nothing wrong.

It would be like the police turning up to your house and demanding you have a receipt for every item in your house. Any item you do not have a receipt for is assumed to be stolen and you have to pay for it. The burden of proof is placed on you to prove you did not steal it. Normally the burden of proof is on the police to prove you have stolen, suddenly it has been turned upside down.

Can you prove you have purchased every copy of every software instance on every computer in your organization? Maybe you can because you have excellent record keeping but most are not so efficient. Maybe the invoice cannot be found because it was not forwarded to the right person. Or a paper invoice has been filed incorrectly and nobody can find it. You KNOW you paid for it but cannot prove it. Sorry, but you are guilty and have to pay $10,000 for that server license again. Try explaining that to your boss.

[qes]

> It would be like the police turning up to your house and demanding you have a receipt for every item in your house. Any item you do not have a receipt for is assumed to be stolen and you have to pay for it. The burden of proof is placed on you to prove you did not steal it. Normally the burden of proof is on the police to prove you have stolen, suddenly it has been turned upside down.

So, under what legal authority can Oracle or Microsoft or Red Hat or IBM _force_ you to submit to an audit?

[lmm]

It's in the contract you sign with them to get their software in the first place.

(Of course, if you're smart you don't. I worked for a place that had a sales pitch from Oracle, wanted to use their product, but cut off all contact once our lawyers got a look at the contract they were proposing)

[op00to]

Your police analogy only makes sense if you shop at a warehouse club. You sign a contract (subscription) that agrees to let you take whatever you want (content) from the warehouse store (vendor), but at the end of the year (subscription term), you agree to let the warehouse club work out what you took (true-up) from the store by looking in your garbage (logs, DB, whatever you use to track usage).

If you then are so disorganized at your job that you empty the trash, throw out the receipts, then sit dumbfounded as your contractual obligations come to roost, maybe that conversation with your boss should probably be uncomfortable.